VMware vCenter Server

Features

The VMware vCenter Server platform is the industry’s most robust virtualization management solution. Advanced capabilities provide the greatest visibility, proactive management and scalability for your virtual environment. vCenter Server is a foundation you can easily extend for end-to-end integration with your physical environment and upon which you can build a private cloud infrastructure.

Hardware monitoring with CIM SMASH enables alarms when hardware failures of key components such as fans, system board and power supplies occur, providing an integrated view of physical and virtual server health.

Improved alerts and notifications support new entities, metrics and events such as datastore- and VM-specific alarms. These alarms can trigger new automated workflows to remedy and pre-empt problems.

Improved performance graphs monitor virtual machines, resource pools and server utilization and availability with more detailed statistics and graphs that can be viewed in real time or across a specified time interval.

Proactive Management of VMware vSphere

Host Profiles standardize and simplify how you configure and manage ESXi host configurations. Capture the blueprint of a known, validated configuration - including networking, storage and security settings - and deploy it to many hosts, simplifying setup. Host profile policies can also monitor compliance.

Improved energy efficiency with full support for VMware Distributed Power Management, which continuously monitors utilization in a DRS cluster and puts hosts in standby to reduce power consumption when the cluster needs fewer resources.

New vCenter Orchestrator is a powerful orchestration engine that simplifies management by enabling you to automate over 800 tasks using out of the box workflows or by assembling workflows using an easy drag-and-drop interface.

New version of vCenter Server Heartbeat (sold separately) extends availability for vCenter Server, failing over the management server and database over the LAN or WAN to a standby server. vCenter Server Heartbeat has deep awareness of all vCenter Server components and is simple to configure and deploy.

A Scalable and Extensible Management Platform

Improved large-scale management is possible with vCenter Server since it is designed from the ground up to handle the largest IT environments. vCenter Server is a 64-bit Windows application, providing substantial scalability improvements. A single instance of vCenter Server manages up to 1,000 hosts and 10,000 running virtual machines, and with Linked Mode you can manage up to 30,000 virtual machines across 10 vCenter Server instances. VMware HA and DRS clusters can support up to 32 hosts and 3,000 VMs.

Linked Mode provides a scalable architecture and visibility across multiple vCenter Server instances, with roles, permissions and licenses replicated across the infrastructure so you can simultaneously log in, view and search the inventories of all vCenter Servers.

View the VMware vCenter Linked Mode Video

Integration with systems management products web services APIs protect your investments and give you freedom of choice in how you manage your environment.

Dynamic allocation of resources. vSphere DRS continuously monitors utilization across resource pools and intelligently allocates available resources among virtual machines based on pre-defined rules that reflect business needs and changing priorities. The result is a self-managing, highly optimized and efficient IT environment with built-in load balancing.

Energy efficient resource optimization. vSphere Distributed Power Management continuously monitors resource requirements and power consumption across a DRS cluster. When the cluster needs fewer resources, it consolidates workloads and puts hosts in standby mode to reduce power consumption. When resource requirements of workloads increase, DPM brings powered-down hosts back online to ensure service levels are met.

High Availability

Automatic restart of virtual machines with vSphere HA. Provide an easy to use and cost-effective failover solution.